Kenneth Farber, ALR president, says that Dr. Collins’ support of research for autoimmune diseases—and SLE, in particular—is encouraging because it helps address the three main frustrations of the lupus community.
“Frustration No. 1 is the disease is misunderstood,” he says. “Frustration No. 2 is the disease is so heterogeneous that it becomes very difficult for pharma to begin to develop therapies to redress it. Frustration No. 3, as compared with other autoimmune or inflammatory diseases that impact a similar number of patients, [is] the federal funding and the private funding for lupus is significantly less.”
Enter AMP and its $40 million-plus investment over the next three to five years.
“We were thrilled, delighted, excited and just pumped when we learned that he had decided to include lupus as one of the diseases that AMP would pursue,” Mr. Farber says. “The bottom line is [that] anytime you can tell your story to a person whose opinion really matters—and Francis Collins’ opinion really matters—you’ve done something important.”
For his part, Dr. Collins said it’s important that SLE and RA were taken together in AMP because “recognizing there is some considerable interest in the overlaps between those [diseases], and by working on them together, we would probably make interesting progress.”
He also noted that unlike more abstract academic pursuits, AMP funding is looking for fast results.
“This is not like the typical academic effort, where you give a grant and say, ‘Hope you do something nice; talk to you in three years,’” Dr. Collins joked. “This is very much milestone driven.”
AMP’s RA and SLE research will focus on genes, proteins, chemical pathways and networks involved at a single-cell level, announced the NIH when the program was unveiled last year. Aside from work at the cellular or small-group level, funding from AMP will collect tissue samples from people with RA and SLE for molecular analysis, develop computational tools to integrate data types so molecular pathways can be understood and make the data available to the broad research community for further analysis, The Rheumatologist reported.
“Wouldn’t it be interesting if we could look at what’s going on in lupus at the unit that biology actually uses to carry out things that biology cares about?” he said. “Which is the cell—the single cell. That seems almost unimaginable to somebody like me who, 10 years ago, thought we would be doing really well to look at thousands of cells. But things have changed.”